Creative Project

The focus of my creative paper will be my fraternal and maternal grandmothers in the mid 1900’s.

My mothers’ mother, my grandmother, story began when my grandfather left my grandmother for “another  woman”. She was left to raise six girls alone in a small, rural town.  I can’t imagine the trauma that was created by in her life as a result of his action. Men just did not leave their wife and children.

But survive she did. One of the more memorable events with my grandmother came about in 1963, we (my family of 7 and my grandmother) left for Montana to check out land that she had inherited from her parents.  My grandmother had gotten reports from the state geologists that seemed to indicate that drilling for oil might prove lucrative.

So we piled in our Oldsmobile, no air conditioning, to begin our 731 mile trip to Billings, Montana.

Three people sat in the front seat, my Dad, Mom and my brother. Myself, my three sisters, and grandma sat in the back seat.  Our meals were eaten out of the trunk (as our serving area) from “sandwich food” we purchased daily at local grocery stores.  We ate in ditches, field approaches, or parks, never in restaurants.  We slept in motels only twice on the way out to Montana.  She made every day an adventure.

The best moment of the day was to have it be your turn to be in Grandma’s room for the night.  Grandma would take two of us girls to share her room and the rest of the family would be in my parent’s room.  This arrangement, even after being together all day in the car, created a definite bond with my grandmother. She dressed in a dress each day, washed her nylons in the sink each night, and when morning came, put her hat on for the day and off we would go.  Never complaining (she was at the beginning her fight with Lou Gehrig’s disease).  To me, she was a tower of strength.   Unfortunately, she died two years later.

My fraternal grandmother lived closer to our home and she too lost her husband. This grandmother was also left  to raise six children, after her husband, my grandfather, was killed in a work related accident.

She worked as a laundry aide/nurse’s aide in the local hospital to feed and clothe her children.  She did not have a car so she walked to work each day, walked to get her groceries, walked to church, and amazingly lived until she was 91.

Both of these women have my utmost admiration.  They were both thrust suddenly into single life in the early 1940’s at time when each of them could have remarried just for food and housing and allowed their children to become “free labor” for an overzealous farmer, as was so often the case. Or they could have given up the overwhelming responsibility of raising their children to someone else or sent their children to an orphanage to be cared for by the state, but they both stuck it out alone.

 I give them credit for raising their children with the values, along with the religious and hard work ethic, that they lived by.   Overcoming adversity and surviving without handouts from anyone, as family was not close by.   This was definitely an example of living “without a net”.  

Both my grandmother’s place in my coming of age is reflected quite well in the statement of Karl Knapper in his essay he states [I may be] “black and queer , but I’ve come from a long line of survivors.” “Since then, he states, “my mother has been an amazing source of strength and support of me”.  These characteristics are what my grandmothers represented to me, strength, support, and resilience.  They didn’t complain about the adversity that had come their way, they did what they had to do to survive.  It may not be an earth moving part of your growing up at the time, but, it becomes a source of strength and support as you grow older.

Gloria Stienam riterated this statement “If I have any advice, it’s just to listen to your own unique self and make sure  have support for it.  This culture in general is much too much saying that we have to do what’s out there rather than what’s in here.  It needs to be a balance.  It isn’t that we’re more important than anybody else as an individual, but we’re not less important either.”